Think your injury is bad? At least you can still send texts

Industry news roundup: week ended 24 June 2013:

Never mind that some poor bloke was nearly crushed to death and only ended up with £70,000 – one worker wants £150,000 because he can’t send texts anymore.

I had really thought I’d seen, heard, and read everything when it comes to personal injury claims, but I was so very wrong; this week, I found out about one man that is so upset at no longer being able to send texts on his mobile that he’s looking for £150,000 in personal injury compensation! Meanwhile, even as I read this ridiculous bit of news I was struck at the difference between him and another person who nearly died in a terrible personal injury at work, but only received £70,000 in damages, and I can only conclude that the world has gone absolutely mad.

Isaak Alpman, an IT specialist, says he tumbled down a flight of stairs while at work and sustained what his personal injury solicitors called ‘personal injuries,’ whatever in the world that means. Somewhere along the way he did something to his right index finger that rendered him unable to send texts or use other sorts of items that he usually does for work, so now he wants massive sums of cash because the stairwell was unsafe.

Listen, I’m not about to say that anyone wasn’t terribly injured or not – I wasn’t there and I can’t say for sure what happened. But £150,000 for a crooked finger seems more than a bit mad to me – especially when other people have received much less for injuries much more severe – like when a metal cutting tool weighing well over a tunne landed atop an engineer so spectacularly that onlookers thought he had been instantly crushed to death!

David Hynds found himself trapped between the floor and a girder support when the massive tool fell 13 feet to the ground below, sustaining life-threatening fractures to his vertebrae. Unbelievably it just took five minutes for the 52 year old man to extricate himself safely from his position, and he was left with some quite severe and long-lasting injuries.

Mr Hynds, who is undoubtedly a very lucky man to have escaped with his life – considering how one of his colleauges was convinced Mr Hynds had been slain instantly in the accident as he observed it – found that since the accident he had both enough physical pain and post-traumatic stress that he simply could not return to work in any sort of reliable capacity. As a result he brought a compensation claim against his employers and received a £70,000 compensation package for his trouble.

In other words, one man gets a one-tonne weight dropped on him and is satisfied with only £70,000, so where does another man get off with asking for £150,000 for a crooked finger?